The Role of Learning Processes in University Inclusion. The Italian Case

This proposal aims to bring to the academic community's attention the first research outputs of the doctoral thesis project entitled "Universitabile: indagine sull’inclusione universitaria degli studenti con disabilità e DSA nel contesto universitario romano", based, specifically, on the relationship between educational inclusion (Ainscow and Miles, 2009) and ICT (Information and Communication Technology). Starting from a review of the literature on the role of universities as places of inclusion and confrontation with diversity (Bolt and Penketh, 2016; Moriña and Gavira, 2015), the proposal analyses the main inclusion strategies implemented by the three main universities in Rome: La Sapienza, Tor Vergata and Roma Tre. Through a mixed method approach, the contribution analyses the answers to the interviews administered to the operators of the dedicated services, facing the issue of barriers and facilitation mechanisms. In this context, ICT, during the Covid-19 emergency, acted as a facilitator allowing people with disabilities to benefit from distance learning by presenting new perspectives for the realisation and realisation of the learning process, a point that emerges from the voices of the professionals involved as shown in the following extract: "We have young people who have studied and finished their thesis with the tutor from home, sharing the Word file of the thesis in the drive and editing it in real time". In this sense, as Tsatsou (2020) found, the inclusion of people with disabilities can be facilitated by the use of digital technologies. The author emphasises how these help to alleviate stigma in several ways, by: • assisting in performing daily tasks and overcoming difficulties; • enabling connection with those who have the same type of disability, increasing their sense of belonging and improving their social integration; • facilitating processes of self-identification and technology-mediated communication with others. An idea that can also be found in Valentini (2008), who emphasises how the use of digital technologies is a prerequisite for the development of concrete solutions, these, in fact, "break down boundaries and create a new deterritorialised space that can be accessed by a wider range of users than that represented by traditional students" (ibidem:17). The author goes on saying that deterritorialisation "creates the prerequisites for carrying out actions and accessing services related to didactics and university training from different places: from home, from the workplace, from other centres that do not coincide with the university's seat, such as decentralised poles" (ibid:22). This process is considerably accelerated by the Covid-19 emergency, which provides the basis for rethinking technology in terms of Universal Design, that is "an approach to the design of technologies that pays greater attention to the concept of universal usability: buildings and tools must be conceived, designed and constructed in such a way as to be usable by all" (Fiocco and Martinati, 2002:232). Despite the evidence presented, it is useful to remember that technology if conceived as a facilitator but designed only on the characteristics of able-bodied users, can represent a barrier because, by replacing classic socialisation methods, it risks to become a powerful instrument of exclusion.